1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the disclosure related in general to information processing and in particular to collaborative, incremental specification of identities in an information system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Certain multiuser information systems host content provided by their users. To facilitate searching and navigation, this content is often explicitly tagged with keywords, which are sometimes called “tags”. These keywords are strings of characters, and their meanings typically depend on the users who assign them to content. A single string of characters can have different meanings for different users. For example, one person's “Paris” might refer to the capital city of France, while another person uses “Paris” to mean the small town of Paris, Tex., U.S.A. For another user, “Paris” could mean a certain celebrity. A user searching for “Paris” could find content relating to all of these topics when only one of these topics was desired.
Some systems organize and integrate content from multiple information processing sources. Ambiguity in terms used to relate content can result in erroneous links. For example, a news story about “Georgia” could refer either to the sovereign nation of Georgia or a state in the Southeastern United States, and sometimes disambiguation heuristics fail (see FIG. 4 Illustration 1).
In some cases, keywords for content are too specific or too general for efficient searches or integration at varying degrees of precision. For example, content tagged with “Paris” will not be found with a search for “France” unless other information links the two strings for the search. Any such linking is vulnerable to the confusion about what “Paris” means. Content relating to a Paris, France but tagged only with “France”, will not be found with a simple search for “Paris”. To mitigate these deficiencies in part, some content is manually tagged with multiple keywords to reflect decreasing specificity. Equivalently, a search for one keyword is expanded to search for related keywords. However, the potential for confusion about intended meanings of keywords remains.
These obstacles to precise search are not limited to geographical references. Almost any entity or concept has generalizations or refinements. For example, content tagged with “heron” will not be located with a simple search for “bird” or “animal” unless other information is used to relate the concepts. Similarly a simple search for “hawk” will not find content relating to hawks but tagged only with “bird”. Furthermore, this behavior occurs with any content references, not just tags. For example, a document that discusses herons without ever referring to “animal” won't be found by a simple search for “animal”. Remedies often encounter ambiguity from the operative strings.
When a user wishes to search, navigate, or integrate content originating from multiple systems, these problems are can be compounded due to differences in user communities, divergent keyword syntactic constraints, and other factors. One content system might provide sufficient support for relatively unambiguous terminology, but inter-system ambiguity remains.